Kramnik vs. Leko

The world chess championship match between Kramnik and Leko is running. The first game ended with a win for Kramnik. You can follow the games live at
www.worldchesschampionship.com.

It is decided: Kramnik is World champion again.

Checkmate

I corrected an error (harmless but ugly) that showed up when entering a mating move. (thanks to Paul!)

Kramnik vs. Leko

There are some interesting interviews of the players and their seconds at the Chessbase site. This Bareev has an astounding sense of humour...

For those of you who do not read chess magazines: Kramink and Leko play a world championship match starting on September 25th.

Security warning

Someone is sending out faked emails that seemingly come from PlayChess. But these email have nothing to do with PlayChess.de. Please delete them immediately, do not click on any of the links contained in this mail!

The mail shows up in your email client as coming from games@playchess.de or from antispam@playchess.de with the subject line "E-mail technical support message.".

This is the content of the mail I got this morning:

============== Start of faked email =====================
Dear user of "Playchess.de" mailing domain,

Cheers,
The Playchess.de team http://www.playchess.de
============== End of faked email =====================

As can be easily seen from the email header, this mail came from the network address 200.141.212.129 (this is not playchess!).

And I don't sign my messages with "The Playchess.de team"...

Be careful!
Thomas (webmaster of PlayChess.de)

For those of you who can understand email headers, this is the complete header:

Return-path:
Envelope-to: tournaments@playchess.de
Delivery-date: Fri, 17 Sep 2004 22:45:51 +0200
Received: from [200.141.212.129] (helo=biblio1.net)
by mxng13.kundenserver.de with smtp (Exim 3.35 #1)
id 1C8Pbz-0003d1-00
for tournaments@playchess.de; Fri, 17 Sep 2004 22:45:44 +0200
Date: Fri, 17 Sep 2004 17:45:31 -0300
To: tournaments@playchess.de
Subject: E-mail technical support message.
From: antispam@playchess.de
Message-ID:
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: multipart/mixed;
boundary="--------xwvqeomvhsskarotigvi"

Hey, email cheater, do you read this?
You have to learn much more - this is too easy. We could really get you - and we will, if you try this again!

Search and Translate

Two (minor) features have been improved: the site search is now powered by the Google search engine. Google has most of the relevant pages of PlayChess in its database. Now you can even search for player names.

The second improvement is already active since 1-2 weeks. We know use the free translation service of IBM for most languages. These translations seem to be better than the other ones we had tried before.
The russian translation, however, is still powered by translate.ru.

Thank you to both services for their excellent work!

Round 5 is running!

The chess clocks of round 5 of the PlayChess Open 2003 (ACL-S001) have been started. Please make your move!

ACL Swiss, Round 5

The fifth round of our Swiss tournament in the ACL league will start on Thursday, September 9th at 22:00 GMT.

Tournament table of ACL-S001

After 4 rounds there are still 5 players with a "clean" score:
- Blitzmich,
- Lullo,
- Coolhandluke,
- Stefan Walter and
- JdR

The top pairings
- Blitzmich vs. Lullo,
- Coolhandluke vs. Cramneck and
- Stefan Walter vs. JdR
promise to become very interesting. But there is still a broad field of follow-ups (10 players with 3.5 points, 31 with 3.0). Any of these may well be the number one after this fifth round.

Good luck to all participants!
Thomas

Inverted boards

Some players saw inverted boards (with themselves on the top side).
This error is now resolved.

Background:

This problem showed up, if you had set the board orientation (on your preferences page) to "Moving player". Since the program for displaying the chess board used the color of the moving player of the previous game (instead of the current game) the orientation had been calculated wrongly.

Acknowledgements:

Several players reported this error - thank you all. Especially the detailed analysis of Patrick McCartney made localizing this bug very easy.

Some corrections

Corrections:
- Move notes can be entered and are displayed.
- Draw offers handled correctly
- Next game after making a move
- Back to player homepage after last game

Wrong game error

I finally found that strange error. Now again you can see any game played at PlayChess. Thanks for all your hints, they helped a lot.

The other problems will be attacked tomorrow (I go to sleep now). I am quite optimistic that I can resolve most of them quickly.

Strange errors

We still have some strange behaviour:
- opening an old, finished game often displays the wrong game page
- the board is (sometimes) displayed with your side on top

These errors will be corrected as soon as possible.

I already checked the database: your data are okay, don't worry, "only" the display of the games does not work.

I am back!

You noticed it: strange messages on your player homepage, page changes that disappear an hour later and last not least: new errors ... well, your webmaster is back!

I have to apologize to all of you for my long absence. My regular job (the one I get a living for) demanded 100 percent of my attention. So I simply did not find the time for PlayChess.

That's why so many planned features are still under development. And it explains the delay with the Swiss tournaments. Our tournament director Paul has nothing to do with these delays - it's all up to me. Sorry!

The good news is that the next round of the Swiss tournaments will start soon. Players who did not start their game in the last round will be withdrawn from the tournament - unless they tell me otherwise (hint, hint, ...). The exact starting dates will be published soon.

Thomas

Making moves - again

The problems with entering moves should now be resolved.

The behaviour of the game page changed a little (this time intentionally):

After clicking on the target square the resulting position is displayed immediately. Hence, there is little need for the Preview button. Nevertheless, you still have to click on the Move button to actually make the move.

Minor changes have also been applied to the error handling. I am sure, you will discover these soon...

Making moves

I uploaded a new game page to resolve the problems when entering moves with the keyboard. However, another error prevents you from making moves with Black.

I am working on this problem. Please retry later.

Sorry!

Entering moves

Entering moves with the keyboard does not work, currently. Please enter the moves with the mouse.

- Click on the piece you want to move
- Click on the destination field

Now you see the resulting position.

I am working on this problem. Entering moves with the keyboard will soon be available again.